NEWS

The oil company BP says it has successfully started to siphon oil from its leaking Gulf of Mexico well to a tanker on the surface.

BP executive Kent Wells would not say how much oil was being siphoned but said the process was “working well”.

BP succeeded on its third attempt to insert a long narrow tube into the leaking pipe, using underwater robots.

Earlier, scientists said they had found vast underwater plumes of oil, one 10 miles (16km) long and a mile wide.

Damages response

It is thought that BP’s 6in-wide (15cm) tube and stopper could capture more than three-quarters of the leak, although a smaller spill nearby also has to be contained.

The tool became dislodged from the broken well riser after it was first inserted a mile beneath the surface on Saturday night.

But it was now back in place, senior executive vice-president Mr Wells said on Sunday at the firm’s US headquarters in Houston, Texas.

Over the next few days the company planned to slowly increase the amount of oil and gas flowing through the pipe to the tanker, he said.

The energy giant also suggested it had already made clear its position on paying damages for the disaster, a day after the US government demanded immediate clarification on the issue.

The Obama administration said in a letter it wanted to be sure BP would honour commitments not to limit costs to a US statutory cap of $75m (£50m).

BP said last week the cap was irrelevant and it would settle all legitimate damages claims.

“What they are requesting in the letter is absolutely consistent with all our public statements on the matter,” said BP spokesman David Nicholas on Sunday.

Estimates questioned

BP would not comment on scientists’ discovery of several new vast plumes of oil below the ocean’s surface.

Researchers from the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology new puma shoes said they had detected the slicks lurking just beneath the surface of the sea and at depths of 4,000ft (1,200m).

Samantha Joye, a marine science professor at the University of Georgia, said: “It could take years, possibly decades, for the system to recover from an infusion of this quantity of oil and gas.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s impossible to fathom the impact.”

Chemical dispersants BP has been dumping underwater may be preventing the oil from rising to the top of the ocean, the scientists said.

The find suggests the scale of the potential environmental disaster is much worse than previously feared since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up on 20 April, killing 11 workers.

Some scientists cast doubt on BP’s estimate of the oil flow rate, saying the widely cheap puma shoes repeated figure of 5,000 barrels per day dramatically understates the real amount.

A week ago, BP tried to cap the well with a 100-tonne box, but gave up after it became encrusted with ice crystals.

Mississippi has become the third US state to have traces of oil wash up on its coast, along with Louisiana and Alabama.

The spill is threatening to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez leak off Alaska as America’s worst environmental disaster.

European finance ministers are

preparing to meet to vote on a controversial new directive regulating hedge funds and venture capitalists.

London-based fund managers have said the proposals will make it impossible for funds based outside the EU to raise money within Europe.

The US government has argued the plans are protectionist.

Britain’s new government wanted to delay Tuesday’s vote, but a report suggests efforts failed.

Hedge funds use sophisticated, complex investment strategies to make returns, and often make money when markets are falling.

‘Strangle’

They are more important to the UK than almost anywhere cheap puma shoes else in Europe. It is estimated that 80% of Europe’s hedge funds are based in London, and about a quarter of the world’s such businesses.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has said in the past that EU plans to regulate the funds could “strangle” London as a financial centre.

The European Commission wants new rules to overcome what it sees as gaps and inconsistencies in existing, national regulatory frameworks.

It has already delayed one vote – taking it off the agenda at a meeting in March – after former prime minister Gordon Brown persuaded EU officials that more time was needed to reach a consensus.

However, the Financial Times said British diplomats failed in their new puma shoes attempt to persuade the French and German governments that the new UK government also needed more time to prepare for the meeting.

The French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel have been keen for some time to introduce greater regulation for the private equity and hedge fund sectors – which many say played a part in the global financial collapse.

Spain currently holds the EU presidency, and its finance minister Elena Salgado told the FT that other finance ministers would not agree to a delay.

“There is a very clear majority of countries that want to approve it,” she said.

Critics of the proposed changes say that, if approved, the laws would see many funds flee London to Switzerland or elsewhere outside the EU.

Google has admitted that for the past three years it has wrongly collected information people have sent over unencrypted wi-fi networks.The issue came to light after German authorities asked to audit the data the company’s Street View cars gathered as they took photos viewed on Google maps.

Google said during a review it found it had “been new puma shoes mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open networks”.

The admission will increase concerns about potential privacy breaches.

These snippets could include parts of an email, text or photograph or even the website someone may be viewing.

In a blogpost Google said as soon as it became aware of the problem it grounded its Street View cars from collecting wi-fi information and segregated the data on its network.

It is now asking for a third party to review the software that caused the problem and examine precisely what data had been gathered.

“Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short,” wrote Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research.

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust – and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here.”

‘Pushing the envelope’

Google said the problem dated back to 2006 when “an engineer cheap puma shoes working on an experimental wi-fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast wi-fi data”.

That code was included in the software the Street View cars used and “quite simply, it was a mistake”, said Mr Eustace.

“This incident highlights just how publicly accessible, open, non-password protected wi-fi networks are today.”

Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for security firm Ioactive, said there was no intent by Google.

“This information was leaking out and they picked it up. If you are going to broadcast your email on an open wi-fi, don’t be surprised if someone picks it up.”

John Simpson, from the Consumer Watchdog, told the BBC: “The problem is [Google] have a bunch of engineers who push the envelope and gather as much information as they can and don’t think about the ramifications of that.”

Dr Ian Brown, an expert on privacy and cyber security at the Oxford Internet Institute, told BBC News the wi-fi data collection was part of an idea to accurately map a user’s location on Google Map and Street View.

“The idea was to use to the different signals and strengths from wi-fi and phones to position a users – think of it as a sort of GPS.

“However, there are concerns in many countries that Google has broken numerous data protection and privacy laws by collecting this data and I expect a clutch of lawsuits to follow,” he said.

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